
Lead Well And Prosper
Most professionals, entrepreneurs, and members of any small team believe that the key to their prosperity is continuous self-development, hard work, and perseverance in the business. In actuality, their success is more often associated with how well they develop their work relationships and earn relationship capital with peers and business leaders. By leading well and keeping your promises or commitments to yourself and to others, you have a critical behavioral mindset to sustaining distinction and prosperity in a fast changing world.
Creating Sustainable Advantage with Committed Behavior
The competition moves faster than it used to. From the minds of senior business leadership, having the best product or service or making the perfect strategic move doesn’t buy much time in staying ahead of the competition. Accelerating advances in technology is now beginning to reduce the need for knowledge workers, not just the traditional blue collar people. It benefits the company employee, small business owner, or the independent contractor to recognize that social relationships and the relationship capital you earn and build are now the currency of relevancy and success today.

From a credibility perspective, which has been where my body of work comes from, trust or more specifically, relationship capital is the currency of social relationships. And one of the biggest manifestations of that is the ability to get recommended or referred. That is really the ultimate in trust. Are people willing to put their reputation against yours? We define reputation as the personal stock or share price of you. If your personal brand was on the stock market, are they willing to invest in you? Are they willing to put their name with yours? Do you have that credibility that they are willing to share their reputation with yours? To do that, you need to do a certain number of things. You need to know the components of trust and all the things you need to do to increase your relationship capital. For us, the ultimate measure of trust is what people say about you when you are not there. When they come into contact with you or your name, what are they thinking, doing, feeling, saying, that is the realm of reputation. We have an interesting sound bite on it. We call it your “CRED”. That is what pays.
And there are 3 things you want people to pay you:
- You want people to pay you attention because in this time-poor world everyone is fighting for a little bit of “mind-space” to get the world thinking of you.
- You want people to pay you respect; that means they pay a premium for what you do; they do not haggle on price; they treat you well as a client, or a provider or a supplier.
- You want people to pay you money. The degree with which you are trusted and well reputed is the degree by which people will pay you a premium for what you do.
When we talk to people about social networking, in and of itself, this is worthless; it is just a bunch of names. It does not impress us how many people are on your cell phone. What would impress us is if we called one of these people at random and asked what could you do for this guy and they said, “What do you need?” That is the measure of a social network to us. It is no good having trust or a reputation if you cannot commercialize that for business. We all want to put food on our table. Nobody networks for fun and nobody gets paid to network. You get paid on the RESULTS of this stuff. That is why the commercial element comes into place. So for us, Social Networking as a Definition is: Attending business related events and engaging online that fulfill your commercial objectives.
The Future of Business is Very Personal
Our forward-thinking clients want to build collaborative workforces. They want to get more networked internally. The is a new way of networking because the traditional big corporation outlook has been to be closed and let’s control the messages we get out there, let’s get everyone on the internet so we can see what they are doing. It is not so collaborative, open, or sharing, but we are seeing a new dawn where people are embracing social media and corporations are allowing their employees to have a voice externally. Internally it is a bit more sharing and embracing.
People are building broader, more diverse networks in order to gain a more competitive advantage and perspective. Banks are learning from Hotels they way they do customer service; the way they engage with their customer. There is a lot of cross-fertilization of industries that are non-competitive to learn what they are doing to engage customers and build a more competitive workforce. So that is an area of opportunity we are moving into. Also, you now see a lot of coaching where people are transitioning in career and they want to go to the next level. We know that 90% of jobs are never advertised. It is that hidden job market. Small business owner and independent contractors are seeking opportunities as well.

So how do they build and leverage those high-level networks? How do they create that next opportunity? How do they get talked about in the right way?
This stuff is only going to become more important. A few years ago we had the Fax machine. So we started using the telephone and then the Fax became the big thing. Then the email came up. We left the phone and the fax and started using email. We sort of got to a handle on email and then social media came up and we are just beginning to get a handle on that. It overwhelms us with more and more roots to market, text messages, instant messages, so many ways now to communicate. It envelopes you and social media and social networking is only going to get bigger and bigger. You either dip your toes in the water or jump right in. You cannot ignore it forever.
PE-ER SaaS Overview and Demonstration
Conclusion
So the Standard of trust business is going that way too. That is one reason why we have created the Peer SaaS Platform: Performing Excellence-Engaging Recognition Platform. We all seek social credibility and acknowledgment from our peers. By standing firm with your promises or commitments, you stand out from the competition in a more sustainable way. We hope you will give Peer SaaS a try and earn relationship capital with your connections both inside and outside your company. Lead well and prosper.
www.StandardofTrust.com

